One week in the birth of a song

Monday afternoon: Meet client. Get general instruction and guidelines, style of music needed and some reference artists. (Aprox. 3 hours)

Monday evening: Research. Listen to reference songs. Listen to more songs from same artists. Listen to more songs from same era. (Aprox. 3 hours)

Tuesday evening: research. Download lyrics of reference songs and analyze tempo, chords, lyrics, form and structures. Make notes. Went to bed very late. (Aprox. 5 hours)

Wednesday evening: Start writing lyrics with Celtx on ipad. First just write ideas for the story. Freeform paragraphs. Start to convert paragraphs into one-liners. (Aprox. 3 hours)

Thursday morning: Decide on a song structure. Verse, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, chorus. Decide on song tempo and rhythm. Got general idea of melody in head. Start rewriting lyrics to fit form. (Aprox. 2 hours)

Thursday evening: Spend a lot of time with dictionary.com and rhymezone apps to write lyrics. Get some ideas for chord progression. Start Band in a box (BIAB), type in chords and search for style. Keep working on verse 1, bridge and chorus. Keep playing and singing over and over until it fits. (Aprox. 3 hours).

Friday morning: Refine lyrics more. (Aprox 1 hour).

Friday evening: Start BIAB and loop over and over, changing lyrics to fit chords and rhythm. Refine chords when required. Export midi files. Start Notion and import midi files. Start writing melody in Notion and add lyrics. Keep changing lyrics to fit melody. Go to bed about 2 a.m. (Aprox 6 hours)

Saturday morning: Listen to song. Keep changing lyrics to fit better. Write background vocals in Notion. (Aprox. 4 hours)

Saturday afternoon: Export audio files from Notion for vocal guide tracks. Fire up Sonar. Import midi files and vocal guide tracks. Fire up BIAB and search for real tracks. Export to audio. Search BIAB for piano tracks. Ended up with 5 options. Mix and match piano tracks. Mix up scratch mix in Sonar with Steven Slate drums, Virtual Piano, Sampletank C7 piano, Dim Pro on Bass, Realband on 2 x acoustic guitars and 2 x electric guitars (Aprox. 3 hours)

Saturday evening: Export audio 1 mix with instruments only and 1 mix including vocal guide tracks. Print pdf with lyrics from Celtx. Write pdf with vocal music from Notion. Upload to web site and send email to client with links. (Aprox. 2 hours)

Saturday evening: Wait for reply from client and write blog.

Not bad. About 35 hours on a song. I have written song before in less time, but most of the time a song would take much longer than this. This song is far from done. Next the client will want to make changes. If we are lucky, not many. Then at least a three hour session to record the vocals. Another 3 hour session to record back tracks. Depend on client budget, the final tracks may go to another studio for mixing. That is another 6 hours. All in all, we may have a song at the cost of 50 hours.

How much shall we charge? At a minimum union wage rate this song is worth some. I would be so lucky. Let's face it. I will be only to happy to make one tenth of that amount and hope life time royalties will make up another few bucks. If one song out of every 25 songs get some radio play or gets accepted on a movie soundtrack, it might make up for a bit more and might actually earn half of what it cost. The other 24 songs? We keep on reminding ourselves that we do this because we enjoy it.

And yes. We do do this because we enjoy it.

 

News from Broadway - Evita fails to show a profit

The Lost Angeles Times ran a story this week about Andrew Lloyd-Webber's hit show, Evita, closing its doors. This is interesting news for all of us and there are much we can learn from it, even if we are not playing in the same league. This revival of Evita has it all. Ricky Martin and Elena Roger as the stars, Lloyd-Webber's music, a movie to remember, and an advertising budget like never before. Yes, if any show had potential, that must be it.

In contrast, Lloyd-Webber's Phantom of the opera celebrated its 25th year in London last year and this same week, the 25th year on Broadway. Hope you have seen the show when it came to a theater near you. I was in second heaven when I saw it at the Teatro last year. If you do not have the celebration concert DVD, shame on you - you must get it.

What we can take out from this is important. Big budgets does not make a success - at least not always. The $11 million made sure that the show would be of greatest quality. Just remember, if you want to spend big budgets, you have to earn even more to pay it back.

Big names does not always make for big profits. The times reports in the story quoted above that shows staring Ricky Martin showed better ticket sales. What it does not say, but can be assumed, is that the bigger names also insist on bigger salaries. If you want to splash out on big stars, you will have to make sure that they can bring in more than what you spend on them. That is a most basic budget principle.

The story above also reports that the show ran for 46 weeks on Broadway, but it needed 63 weeks to recoup the costs. We can safely assume that the budgeting team did not make such simple mistake. What most likely went wrong is that the attendance was lower than expected. Mmmm. Looking at the gross figures as reported on The Broadway League for the previous week, this show ran to a crowd of close to 80% capacity. Mmmmm. Make me wonder. If the budget team made the assumption that they needed to contract their stars for 46 weeks only, and 80% attendance was not enough to make it, then what on earth did the budget team assume for attendance? A lesson to be learned, which I have learned in grade one of finance 101, is that you never budget  to sell at 100% capacity. Always make sure that you have some margin. I read on the internet and in learned books that a 60% attendance on Broadway is about average. In budgeting basics you learn that, when you draw up your budget, starts with a likely scenario (say 60%), contract your expenses to make sure you break even at a pessimistic scenario (say 50%), and then make sure your product quality and appeal aims for an optimistic scenario (say 80%). With this simple budgeting model you make sure that you will make big profits when your show hits it big. Yeah I know I am selling cars by daylight and musical theater on Broadway is something very different, but we are talking basic business principles here.

So much for complicated budgeting stuff for now. Until next time, and oh yes, I wish Ken Davenport all the best with his production of Macbeth on Broadway. There is one producer who will not make any such mistakes when drawing up a budget.